First and foremost this is an entertaining and irreverent tale of
childhood and adolescence told with great humor, honesty, and empathy.
But it's also told by someone who became a peace and justice and
environmentalist activist in later life, someone able to look back on
the poverty, racism, consumerism, militarism, sexism, and Catholicism of
her youth with passion and perspective -- even appreciation for all the
good that was mixed in with the bad. Hanrahan writes what in outline
form would read like an endless tale of misfortune, and yet leaves you
with the thought of how much riotous fun she and her eight siblings and
other acquaintances had.

I know Clare, though I learned much more about her from this book,
and I wouldn't risk changing her if I had a time machine and magical
powers. But I still found myself wondering, as with most stories of most
people in the United States and much of the world, how different
Hanrahan's life would have been in a society with the decency to provide
free college and free job training as needed, or a society that
integrated civic activism into everyone's life, or a society in which
peace activist careers were marketed on the level of military
recruitment ads or even marketed at all so that they weren't so
frequently found so late, or a society in which some of the best people
didn't live below a taxable salary level so as not to pay taxes for
wars.

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Hanrahan gives us her family genealogy first, and by doing so teaches
some U.S. history that echoes through the book and the years. So, she
shows us the cruelty of Jim Crow, for example, through personal
experiences as a white girl, but illuminates it with an understanding of
its origins, and -- even more importantly -- an awareness of its latest
incarnations today. She also contrasts what she knows of the history of
Memphis with what she was taught in school in Memphis growing up.

Hanrahan tells her story largely in chronological order, with no
lengthy flashbacks, but with numerous quick bits of foreshadowing. For
example:

"Brother Tommy gouged his initials, TPH, with a pocket
knife on that same bannister long before the American war in Viet Nam
maimed his hand, stole his youth, poisoned him with Agent Orange, and
eventually took his life and that of his twin brother Danny. The
bannister was later knocked down by a speeding car that careened into
the porch stopping just short of the front bedroom."

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Tommy returned from Vietnam to a hospital. "In my naivete," Hanrahan writes,

"I rushed to my brother's bedside to embrace him. I may
even have called him 'my hero' as I approached, expecting a hug.
Lightning fast his good arm flailed out knocking me across the room and
onto the floor. 'Wake up!' he said. 'Wake up you stupid b*tch.' I can
still hear those harsh words. Dazed and confused, I picked myself up and
backed away. This was not the brother I had sent away with a patriotic
poem, proudly recited before my senior class."

Hanrahan's two veteran brothers suffered in many ways, and failed to
fit back into society in many ways, but it was the cruelty toward women
that they came back from the war with that their sister Clare eventually
found intolerable.

When Hanrahan left Memphis she saw a lot of the country and a bit of
the world, including living off the grid on land and water, joining
intentional communities and finding her way to a job writing for peace.
She also protested for peace and spent six months behind bars. During
the course of her ramblings, Hanrahan managed to be present at or part
of an extraordinary number of crucial events and developments in recent
U.S. history. Hanrahan became editor of Rural Southern Voice for Peace just in time for the first Gulf War and the awful wars that have followed.

Hanrahan found her way back to Memphis on numerous occasions,
sometimes for funerals, but also to be part of activist efforts such as
the successful campaign to preserve the band shell in Overton Park
launched by one of her brothers. Hanrahan intersperses her memories with
her dreams and poetry, adding emotional depth to an account of an
extraordinary family in a struggling city that I've enjoyed visiting but
would like to visit again with this book as a guide.

David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online (more...)